Interview with NICK JAMESON

August 2025

Multitudes who spend their evenings riveted to TV screens may associate his face with the roles of Russian president Suvarov and Australian psychic Malkin in the, respectively, “24” and “Lost” series, and those who love old video games may recognize his voice from “Full Throttle” and “Day Of The Tentacle” – but for all the popularity of these perennials, Nick Jameson’s claim to fame, if not fortune, and to creative immortality lies elsewhere. Before he turned into an actor, this American artist used to be a record producer of some renown, known to many by the studio wizardry he applied to classic FOGHAT albums. Among those was the evergreen “Fool For The City” on which Nick also played bass and which celebrates a half-centennial anniversary in 2025 with an expanded reissue, so his four-string pulse on “Slow Ride” is familiar to a lot of regular listeners and “Guitar Hero” fans.

A conversation with Mr. Jameson has long been overdue, then, given his numerous achievements, such as a hit-bearing solo release on Motown, and here’s the results of our chat – strictly limited to music yet full of surprises nevertheless.

– Nick, if people ask you, “Who are you?” what would you answer? Are you primarily an actor, musician, comedian or producer?

I’m a spiritual being in a physical body. (Laughs.) If they ask me what I do, I wouldn’t just say one thing: it’s whatever I’m doing at the time, I guess, that’s what I am. While I was finishing up this FOGHAT material, I was a record producer and a mixer, but before that, I was writing songs for a movie, so I was a composer, and then, I’m doing stand-up comedy several times a week and I also play blues every week, so I don’t really identify with any of those. They’re just all things that I do, but not who I am. They’re all different, and I’m very lucky in my life, because I rarely had to do things I didn’t want as far as work is concerned, so I enjoy them all in different ways. If I’m mixing a record, it’s very hyper-focused, and that can be enjoyable but also dangerous. When I’m on stage, I have the relationship with the audience, which is a much more interactive thing; with cameras on me, I feel very focused but it’s a Zen-like feeling, because I’m in the now. All of these things have their own experience; they’re all creative endeavors, but such different experiences are hard to compare. And I certainly wouldn’t say, “Okay, this is my favorite thing to do!” because it varies, it really does, at any time.

– Do you think the general audience who don’t even know your name are more familiar with your face on screen or with your bass line on “Slow Ride”?

I have no idea. There’s no way to know.

– Still, in the beginning, music seemed to be what you wanted to do. You started out in Philadelphia, with a band named THE FINESTUFF.

Yeah, but I actually had bands before that. I was in a band when I was thirteen, then I moved to Greece for a while and I had a band there; that was when I first started recording: we released a bunch of records, and one of them was a hit. Then I came back and had a few little get-togethers with different musicians, and ended up in THE FINESTUFF which was originally called THE FUZZ, so we were THE POLICE before THE POLICE. (Laughs.) We changed the name because we had a friend who was always saying, talking about wine or whatever, “Man, that’s some fine stuff!” – and we just liked that. That was my first band that I recorded with in America.

– You wrote a piece called “Big Brother” for THE FINESTUFF, which later was re-recorded by THE AMERICAN DREAM. Did one band evolve into the other?

It was all completely different people. THE AMERICAN DREAM was an existing band, who were called THE GREAT AMERICAN DREAM then: I joined them when their guitar player had left to form his own group. I don’t remember exactly how I ended up writing that song but I liked it and played it for the guys, so we decided to do it.

– You also wrote or co-wrote most of their only album, which seemed to have a vague concept about it.

No, Don Van Winkle wrote a lot of it too. He and I were the main writers, but on some of the songs everybody kind of pitched in. We just recorded what we thought were our best songs. I remember when we were out at some picnic, Winkle and I took a walk, and he asked, “What are we going to do for this album?” I said, “We’re just going to play our shit, and see what happens!” There wasn’t a concept behind it at all – it was just what we came up with and tried to make it rocking.

– Both you and Don played guitars, twin guitars, which was a rare thing thing then. How did you come up with that? A lot of people I talked to refer to BLOSSOM TOES as pioneers in that regard, but you seem to land upon this idea independently.

I don’t know BLOSSOM TOES, but as for playing two lead guitars… It was me who mostly played lead, and Don Van Winkle played what you could call a rhythm guitar, with a lot of fingerpicking, so there would be sort of counterparts. We were big fans of MOBY GRAPE who had three guitar players: Skip Spence did very simple rhythm, Jerry Miller, one of my biggest influences, played lead, and Peter Lewis did what Winkle would play – it wasn’t rhythm, it wasn’t lead, it was, in a way, ornamentation, it was very clever stuff that would go around what everybody else was doing. So I wouldn’t say we had double lead guitar in the sense you think of that, we didn’t do solos where we were harmonizing with each other and things like that. Yeah, we did have three guitars, and not many people did back then, but we were simply following our idols.

– Did you have any formal musical education? What you did later, on the “Already Free” album – arranging, orchestrating, and even conducting – requires proper schooling.

Later on, I did. I’m pretty much self-taught. When I was playing rock ‘n’ roll, I hadn’t had really any education at all; before I got into engineering, I started studying harmony, counterpoint and stuff like that; and then, after I left FOGHAT, I went to school for a while and studied, although not for long, orchestration and big band arrangements. I had a lot of ear-training too, which was great, because it’s really necessary for any musician, and I just continued to learn on my own. There are composers like Danny Elfman, who are more self-educated, but I think most people who do that do learn it in a school.

– How much did you learn from Todd Rundgren who produced THE AMERICAN DREAM’s album?

I didn’t learn how to produce or engineer from him, we didn’t sit down and talk about that stuff or anything, but he was definitely an inspiration – the way he would do it all himself. Now, that could have been a good thing or a bad thing for me, because what Todd has that I don’t is the ability to just do something and move on, whereas I tend to work stuff too long sometimes. My style of production is pretty different from Todd’s, so I was more influenced by his energy and his approach, and the whole idea of doing it, rather than have somebody else do it for me. I saw how he would consolidate his songwriting and arrangements with his production, how it would merge together. and I think he saw it that way too – that’s why, I think, he got into it: he wanted to make it all work together. With this attitude, I basically taught myself how to do it.

– And it was enough to land a job with Albert Grossman’s Bearsville Records?

Back in those days, I think we made about thirty dollars a week playing with the band, which you could eat on that back then, and my girlfriend had a job too. But I spent my whole salary one week on a book called “The Audio Cyclopedia” by Howard Tremaine – a huge book! – and I read through that and studied it. Then, I built a studio in Philadelphia in a warehouse where we used to practice; I put a control room in there and little mixers. It was very primitive, just two track tape machines, but I learned – that’s where I basically learned how to engineer, so when I got the job at Bearsville, I was at first just an unpaid intern. I would set up the mics and coil the cables; one night I took all the schematics for the console, took them upstairs, studied them for a couple of days and found my way into it; and I kind of worked my way into engineering. I learned from everybody I worked with: as an assistant, I had a lot of chances to watch other people work, and I decided things that I liked doing and things I didn’t like that I didn’t want to do. I worked with Phil Ramone for a while, assisting him on Peter Yarrow’s record, and learned a lot from him. There was a guy named John Haney, so I learned some tricks from. But again, mostly I kind of made it up.

– To be an engineer or a producer requires a lot of discipline. but being a musician entails a lot of creative liberties. How do you balance these things?

I don’t really see them as that much different. I mean, probably for some people it is, but for me the whole process of making music, including recording, is part of a whole flow. Of course, recording a band is very different than writing a song, although sometime it’s not. When I recorded a band called THE HOOTERS about ten years ago now, I would stand in the studio with them and we’d work on the arrangements – I didn’t even go in the control room until after we thought we’d had a take. I think that discipline’s required in all of that stuff if you want to keep improving your craft and if you want to keep learning. My theory is: discipline is one thing, but when people ask me if they should get into this or that – voiceover, music or whatever – I say, “Well, how much do you love it?” If you’re not passionate about it, you’re not going to work hard enough, because you won’t enjoy working hard enough, and you won’t be competitive unless you really love it. I believe that discipline comes from wanting to do something bad enough that you’re willing to put in the sweat, but I think that’s required for any art form.

– When you worked at Bearsville, did you ever hope that maybe one day you would be involved in a Dylan or THE BAND album?

I didn’t, though I knew the guys in THE BAND. I didn’t know Richard [Manuel] and Robbie [Robertson] that well, even though Robbie lived next door to me, but I hung out a lot with Rick [Danko], who was a good friend, with Levon [Helm] and Garth [Hudson], a real sweetheart. I loved hanging out with Garth, and I’d do things with Rick sometimes, little one-off things, and I worked on some projects that they were working on. But I didn’t really think about that that much, like “I want to record THE BAND!” I was doing my own thing, and they did theirs. At the time that they were recording there, they only did a few things at Bearsville, and I was working with Paul Butterfield. Levon didn’t mind if I used his drum set sometimes, so I was playing it when I was doing a demo for an artist named Casse Culver, and I broke the snare drumhead. I was like, “Oh my God! What am I going to do?” I didn’t even know what kind of head to get him, but he came in the next day while I was pondering all this, and they just keep recording. He never changed the head! He just left it that way! (Laughs.) So yeah, I had those kinds of interactions with them. As far as Dylan, I feel that he’s so unique, and I’m pretty sure he has a lot to say about how his records sound, so I had never thought that I could make Dylan sound like this or like that. It would be fun to work with him, but I didn’t have a lot of those kinds of ambitions, partially probably because I wanted to do my own music, and partially because I was really enjoying who I was working with. It was a constant stream of really cool people in Woodstock who wanted to work with me.

– So let’s talk about a few records that you recorded there. I think the first prominent record you worked on was Bonnie Raitt’s “Give It Up” album.

I’d done a few things before then, but yeah, that was pretty early on. I engineered that album along with a guy named Kendall Pacios, and we mixed it together too: I would do the EQ and he the balancing and things like that – we were a team.

– Then, you were part of Todd’s “Something/Anything?” which would become legendary.

Albert had an apartment upstairs, above the studio, so my girlfriend and I lived there at the time, so I remember it well. Bearsville had two live echo chambers, and at night we’d hear Todd work in one of those. One night I couldn’t sleep because Wolfman Jack was going through the echo chamber over and over, and over again. I didn’t do too much on that record, except that Todd asked me to come down and engineer a couple of tracks, so I can’t claim to have played a big part on that album.

– What about BORDERLINE’s “Sweet Dreams And Quiet Desires”?

That was my friend Jim Rooney’s band. He was the studio manager at the time and later went on to be a big country producer. It was a good band, but I can’t even remember what I did on that record: I know I played guitar on at least one song, and I probably mixed it. I do remember playing a solo on a song called “As Long As It’s You And Me, It’s Forever”: I was in the control room in the middle of a take, with my amp off somewhere, when another of my friends, Howard Johnson, the great tuba player who did some arranging on Paul Butterfield’s record, walked in, and I made a mistake. I was going to start again, but he said, “No, man, it’s a sharp eleventh, man, that’s cool! Leave that in there!” The guy had monster ears! What you think is a mistake is something he could justify into something else. (Laughs.)

– You engineered Butterfield’s “Better Days” and then produced “It All Comes Back” for him. How did you get to know Paul?

The first time I actually met him was when I first moved to Woodstock. Nick Gravenites from THE ELECTRIC FLAG had come down and wanted to do some tracks, so Albert Grossman had put together this thing with all the local luminaries, a lot of people: he had Butterfield on harmonica, Norman Smart on drums and Richard Bell on piano, he had Maria Muldaur come in and do backgrounds, and he had two producers, Robbie Robertson and Ted Templeman. And I got to say, Robbie rode roughshod over the whole thing – he took over not in any kind of aggressive way, but he was just spitting out ideas. It was this big pool of great musicians, and they not only worked together in the studio, but also played on each other’s records, and we’d hang out at the bar at “The Bear Cafe” – and because I was working at Bearsville, I ended up meeting them all and working with Geoff Muldaur.

I got to know Butterfield mostly through Geoff, and the first words Paul ever said to me were: “Want some fried chicken, man?” I didn’t talk to him for a long time after that, but I’d worked with Billy Rich, who was his bass player, on the Jackie Lomax record that I was an assistant on, and I was involved in the Eric Von Schmidt record [“2nd Right 3rd Row”], which Geoff Muldaur was involved in, and he later told Paul that they he should get me to record “Better Days” – which was an honor for me, as I was a huge Paul Butterfield fan. He became a really close friend – he was probably my best friend in Woodstock for the time I lived there – and I learned more about playing blues from him than anybody. He was just a sweet guy and just an amazing musician.

– Was “It All Comes Back” your first work in a producer’s role?

No, the first record I produced was by Jesse Frederick, a really good artist, good songwriter and singer. The single we did [“I Belong To You”] got released, but the album didn’t, so he ended up moving to California and becoming a very successful film composer along with a guy named Bennett Salvay. As a team they did all the must-see TV stuff in the Nineties, the sitcoms, like “Perfect Strangers” and “Full House” – but at the time, he was an aspiring artist and we made a really good record, but the powers that be felt it wasn’t commercial enough. That was my first shot at producing. And I produced a few other people just to help them out. But I actually co-produced “It All Comes Back” with Geoff and Paul. They liked what I did on the first record and decided they wanted to pull me in as producer on the next one. I did the same stuff, really, with a little more input. I had some input on “Better Days” too as far as what kind of sounds we should get, they left all of that up to me, but on “It All Comes Back” the recording situation was different. The band was in the Bearsville Studio, and we recorded in the barn – a big, untreated barn which I think Levon eventually took over and did a weekly radio show from – so it was a very different, more of a live sound, and we had a mobile truck outside. That’s where we did all the stuff, and then I mixed it at Bearsville. So yeah, it was probably the first time I had a production credit on a major artist’s record.

– What kind of producer are you: one who tries to get the best performance out of artist or creates the concept of sound for them?

If you put it that way, I would say it’s both. The way I would break it down is… There are people like Phil Ramone who started as an engineer, but that wasn’t his main focus – he would nurture an artist, make them comfortable and try to get the best out of them. And then there’s guys who come more from a sound point of view and get to be producers because of that. I’m not a Phil Spector type who goes, “This is the way it is: it’s my way or the highway!” – I don’t do that at all. I collaborate with the artist very much as far as songs and arrangements go, but the sound is usually my department, and most of the people I work with hire me because they want my sound or they want me to create a sound palette for them.

– Was that why you played guitar on Butterfield’s “Put It In Your Ear”? It was a different level of trust between the two of you.

Yeah, that was. He put it together very quickly. This was back before the days of synthesizers, and one of the first things you could buy was a funny looking little thing called the Putney [EMS VCS 3]. I had one, so I’d bring it in, and Paul would mess around with it. That’s how he came up with a lick that we turned that into a song [“The Flame”] I played guitar on.

– And when did you first play bass on a record?

When I was fourteen years old, I lived in Greece, where I had a band called THE ZOO. I joined as drummer because their drummer was in Italy, but even though he came back, they wanted me to stay and asked, “Can you play bass?” I said, “I’ll figure it out” – only I didn’t have a bass. But the guitar player had an extra guitar, a weird looking thing with a little speaker in it – I don’t know who made it – and that’s what I used. I took the biggest, fattest, flat-wound guitar E string I could find, and played everything on it with a pick. Later on, in Philadelphia, if I was recording a demo or something, I would play bass – but again, I’d play it with a pick and do very simple stuff, and it wasn’t until I joined FOGHAT that I learned to play bass properly, with my fingers, and I studied it, and got into what it’s about to be a bass player. They had called me and asked if I would join the band; they said, “You play bass, right?” I lied and said, “Yes!” – but it worked out. We went down and played together, and we all got along very well, which was especially important to them, because they had a falling out with their previous bass player. So I studied everybody that I liked and had a crash course in bass playing. I practiced for months, eight hours a day, just learning to play – I did it so much I got tendinitis, and we had to go to Lubbock, Texas, when we were on the road to get an expert to try to fix it. I would say, then, that the “Fool For The City” record was the first time I played actual, real bass.

– Before that you even played drums on Tim Moore’s self-titled debut that you produced.

Tim and I met each other briefly in Philadelphia, and then he moved to Woodstock, about a year or so before I did, so we got in touch and started hanging around and making music. When he got a record contract, he wanted me to produce, so I did. That was quite an adventure! We started recording in a little studio in Bridgeport, Connecticut – not the most scenic town in the world – and then did some sessions in California, where we recorded the strings, . and mixed it at all Bearsville.

– It was around the same time, or a little bit earlier, that you mixed the first FOGHAT album and forged a lifelong friendship with the band.

Yeah, I mixed some tunes. There were some mixes the band weren’t happy with, so the head of Bearsville Records, Paul Fishkin, who had managed THE AMERICAN DREAM in Philadelphia, recommended that FOGHAT give me a shot at mixing them. They liked what I did and that I also played Mellotron and piano on one of the songs – that’s how it all started, that’s how we hooked up. And then it just went from there. One interesting thing: they wanted me to remix “I Just Want To Make Love To You” because of the distortion on the vocal, because Dave Edmunds, who produced their first album, had just probably had a few too many that night – the vocal was just slammed into the red. I told him, “Look, there’s no way. There’s nothing I can do to get rid of that!” I couldn’t even do that nowadays, with AI tools, and everything – it was just too far gone. You distort something like that, you can’t really bring it back, but I tried everything I could to dress it up a little bit, and still it didn’t work. So I said to him, “Just use it the way it is. It sounds cool!” Nowadays, of course, distorting vocals and everything else is quite the thing, and even back then Roy Thomas Baker, when he would produce QUEEN, would hit the tape very hard, and some other folks too, were really big fans of tape distortion – not to that degree as the “Want To Make Love” vocal was, though. Now, with modern production, there’s a lot of saturation and distortion, and tape emulation used, but were probably the first to do a really overdriven vocal.

– If we’re talking about modern production, distortion is less problematic than compression, especially with regard to drums.

It depends on style of music. A lot of alternative and independent artists try to get away from it. Big pop records do tend to be produced that way, but there is definitely a backlash among a lot of artists against it. For a while, it was a matter of making it as loud as possible, but now that doesn’t matter so much because streaming platforms and such even everything out. The loudness wars are pretty much over, but there’s still a lot of super compression and limiting, and hyping of the sound.

– Back to your work… You mentioned that you had already worked with Jackie Lomax, so FOGHAT were not the first British guys you encountered?

No, far from it. I lived in England for a while when I was a kid, and I’d always had a lot of British friends. As for Lomax, I was hiding in the corner, watching everything most of the time and moving a few mics around during the recording. Jackie was a great guy – I got to know him quite well and did some recording with him a few years later. He wanted to try some new things, and we made some really cool records shortly before he passed away that were never released: they were really different, and I had a lot of fun with it. It was almost a Phil Spector-y kind of thing: I used the room a lot, I’d put room mics everywhere and make it all sound very big and spread out.

– From what I heard, Jackie was a shy person, but I assume FOGHAT guys were quite the opposite.

They were a different bunch of characters. You could consider Dave [Peverett] the quietest of them, but once you got to know him he was just a riot, he was hilarious. Rod [Price] was of a brooding sort, he would keep to himself most of the time. [link id=’89846′ text=’Roger [Earl]’], who’s been one of my best friends my whole life, somebody described him as a jolly pirate one time: he walks in a room and everybody lights up. Tony Stevens was a funny guy, big “Monty Python” fan, and we’d goof around a lot. They were all very different, but they were fun to work with, they really were.

– What did FOGHAT hear in your approach that they asked you to produce “Rock and Roll Outlaws”?

I think one thing was that they sensed that I was a rock ‘n’ roller. Their previous producer, Tom Dawes, was a brilliant musician – he was in a pop group called THE CYRKLE, and they had a hit in the Sixties, maybe more than one. He had produced “Energized” for FOGHAT, and it was a good record, which did very well, but they just wanted to work with somebody who could totally understood what they were trying to do – and I could. It wasn’t a side road for me, I knew that whole genre very well, and I think they sensed that.

– To an extent that you not only joined the band in the studio, as a player, but also went on tour with them? How did it feel?

The first time we played a huge arena, when the lights went down, the intro music started, and all the lighters started going up in the air, it was so exciting. I thought, “Man, this is awesome!” After a few times, though, that wore off, and it ended up with me on a big stage where I can barely see the audience and where it’s hard to connect with the other musicians because everything is incredibly loud and isolated. After a while, I wasn’t so much into it and the constant traveling became tedious. When I joined the band, I told them I would do it for a year, because I had a sense that it would be that way. And I was more into other music then, working with people like Paul Butterfield, Geoff Muldaur and Bonnie Raitt. The kind of stuff I was focused on was more earthy, blues-based and acoustic, and I was starting to get into studying jazz a little bit. In fact, when I got the call to join FOGHAT, I was learning an Eric Dolphy solo on the guitar. So I joined the band for a year, and as far as being on the road, that was the right choice because I wasn’t really cut out for it – I prefer playing in small venues where you can interact with the audience and hear everything better. It’s just more fun for me.

– How did you manage to abandon your producer’s duties for such a long time?

I wasn’t a house producer or anything; I produced different artists at Bearsville while I was working as the chief engineer there. My productions were independent, they happened to be on Bearsville.

– Did you find it easy or difficult to be with the band around the clock?

Oh, I love being with those guys! That’s one reason I agreed to join the band, even though I wasn’t a bass player and even though I was into different kind of music: I just really loved the guys. It was great to hang out with them, and we’d have a great fun on the bus. The other reason I joined was, we had already planned to do “Fool For The City” – I knew I was going to produce it – so I figured I might as well be in the band and have more influence on the record musically. It wasn’t a problem in that way, because I already knew the guys very well; it was just natural, because they were family. I first met them when I mixed a song called “What A Shame” for their second record, and they came by to do some stuff that didn’t end up going anywhere.

– Did you expect “Fool For The City” to become such a long-lasting record?

Yeah, I did. I thought this was their best record and I thought “Slow Ride” was going to be a hit. Right after I finished mixing it, Roger and I drove down to Bearsville from Vermont where we’d been doing it, and we played it for Paul Fishkin and Albert Grossman. But they were like, “Nah, that’s not the single…” And we went, “You guys are nuts!” We just kept at them, and so “Slow Ride” became the single, because we knew it was a hit.

– You co-wrote “Take It Or Leave It” for that album. How was it to hear your song sung by Dave Peverett?

Well, he started that song and then I came in and added a lot to it. He came up with the idea, so it was very natural to hear his voice on it. There were some other songs I wrote later that he sang that I wrote all myself, and it was different: it’s great to hear Dave Perret sing your song. Great voice, great vibe.

– That was also the first time that your sense of humor manifested itself publicly. It was your idea that ended up being the album cover, right?

Yeah, I thought it’s got to be something with Roger fishing. I pictured it in my mind as fishing in something close to the sidewalk. There was a little grate next to the sidewalk, but when we got to New York, we decided, “No, a manhole is much better!” Why not? (Laughs.)

– When the tour was over you left, but why did you also resign as FOGHAT producer and weren’t involved with their “Night Shift” album? You wanted to walk away for a while?

After I left FOGHAT, I went to San Francisco, and that’s when I studied music at school. But then I got a call from Paul Butterfield who wanted to form a band, and when Paul calls, you go. I went back to Woodstock, and we did form a band for a while. We didn’t even have a name for it. It probably would have been THE PAUL BUTTERFIELD BLUES BAND. I’m trying to remember who was in it: I think Richard Bell on keyboards, Billy Rich on bass, Eric Parker on drums, and me on guitar. We did some of my songs. We were doing pretty much all my material that ended up on my first record. It’s interesting to think, what could have happened with that, you know? When I look back, it’s like, “Jeez, you know, you got a chance to be Paul Butterfield’s guitar player, man! What was wrong with you?” It was really good, but I just had other ideas: I wanted to do my own record, so I told Paul, “This is what I’m going to do, but I hope you’ll play on it” – and he did. He played some killer harp on “Already Free”! Some of my favorite playing he’s ever done!

– But you came back to produce “Foghat Live”?

That was afterwards, that was after “Already Free”… We did it at the same studio we did “Fool For The City”: Suntreader Studios in Sharon, Vermont, a great sounding room – it was just up on a hill, all by itself in the middle of the beautiful countryside. I did my record there, then I went out and recorded the live album – I think we did it somewhere in upstate New York – and then came back and mixed it at Suntreader. And while we were doing that, we were shooting photos for “Already Free.”

– I just love this record. Not only your music and production have stood the test of time, but also the performances. You played almost everything there. So where did you find self-confidence to finally go solo?

It didn’t come right away. While I was working at Bearsville several years before, I decided that I wanted to record something myself and went into the studio. I set everything up, started doing it and realized that I didn’t liked that song, so I walked off into the woods to my girlfriend’s house and forgot about it. But while I was on the road with FOGHAT, I’d written a lot of songs, and some of them ended up on the album, and when I was in San Francisco studying music, I wrote some more. Now I had a bunch of songs that I thought were really good, so I went back to Woodstock and worked on some more. Yeah, it was a challenge. It was a little stressful getting going, but once I got up there and started doing it, I got into a flow. It was a lot of work playing everything, because unlike now you didn’t have MIDI or any of that stuff, and you literally had to play everything live. I’m not sure why I did it that way – it might have been partly financial.

I didn’t have a record deal at that point, and I paid for that record myself, so the idea of hiring session musicians to come up there and pay them a fortune didn’t appeal to me. Also, I’d been playing these songs with Butterfield, and I felt it wasn’t quite what I wanted, and I knew that if I was doing it myself, I could try much more different stuff. With some stuff I just knew how I wanted it to be: I knew the kind of piano I wanted, the kind of playing on it, the kind of bass. At that point, I was really into bass after the FOGHAT crash course, so I featured it on the record a whole lot. But that could be a real trap, doing everything yourself, and after a while, it got to where I wanted to work more with other musicians, so Eric Parker played drums on most of “Already Free” – a monster drummer! – he was a big part of that record. It was an adventure, it really was, and I doubted myself many times in the process, but I’m happy with the way it came out.

– I always felt like the title track, where you played a great bass solo, was not only addressed to a woman, but also contained your personal statement of freedom. So what was it that you were free from?

I’d been reading a guy named Franklin Jones, a sort of a spiritual teacher – he later changed his name to Bubba Free John and then changed it again about six times – who had a lot of interesting concepts. People are seeking for the answer to this and the answer to that, they want freedom from the ego and freedom from the mind, but he stated that we’re all already free and just don’t know it. So I thought it made a good title.

– It’s a very jazzy and funky record, except maybe for “When The Blues Come Calling” – and on “Sweet Heat” you seemed to be channeling Dr. John. Why did you decide to go into that direction?

It had a lot to do with where I was living, because in Woodstock I was surrounded by very interesting musicians. My piano playing was very influenced by Ronnie Barron, and he comes out of Professor Longhair and the whole New Orleans tradition, so there’s a lot of that on there. My guitar playing was very influenced by Amos Garrett, who played with Butterfield; I wouldn’t say he was a blues guitarist, although he can play the blues, but he has a very unique, melodic style, with a lot of double stops. I didn’t think about it that much, but looking back, it was a product of starting out in rock ‘n’ roll and then being exposed to blues with really good players and to what you would call nowadays Americana, which is a dumb name – it was just rootsy music out of the blues and folk tradition. That’s what was happening in Woodstock, and FOGHAT coming there was not the usual thing. In fact, I was not the usual thing! (Laughs.) I would be wearing velvet pants, I had hair down to here (shows below the shoulders), while everybody else was countrified, old school. So it wasn’t a conscious decision to do this particular kind of music; I just wrote the songs, and they came out how they came out. And there’s a lot of different things on “Sweet Heat”: I’m doing female backup harmonies and falsetto myself there, and I’ve got a jazz guitar solo, out of George Benson – it was pretty harmonically adventurous, especially in the solo with many interesting chords, and then it changes at the end to go back to a downhome slide guitar thing. A product of that place and time is what that record is.

– Indeed, that song suggests you loved fusion.

I liked a lot of jazz players, Wes Montgomery in particular, but I was very into Benson, I really liked the stuff he was doing on those CTI albums and the records before that, so I listened to him and Pat Martino too. It’s definitely in that vibe.

– What about Al Di Meola?

I was never a fan. I got mad respect for him, he’s got chops for days, but it’s not really my thing what Al does. George Benson comes more out of the blues, his jazz guitar playing is very rooted in old-school music, even though he gets very technical.

– You played an acoustic piano on “Sweet Heat” but on “I Know What It Is” you used Fender Rhodes, right?

That was actually a Wurlitzer, not a Rhodes. I wanted the distorted sound, and a Wurlitzer sounds much better, when distorted, than a Rhodes, so I put it through an amp and just cranked it up.

– And then, you had real strings “The Long Way Around” which you also arranged and conducted, and on “In The Blue” that you had somebody else work on.

Yeah, my friend Paul Leka arranged it: he was a good arranger, and he had a studio in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which is actually where I made the Tim Moore record. I’d liked what he did with Harry Chapin, so I told Paul what I wanted, and he did a great job of pulling it off. But I did “The Long Way Around” myself, and I had a lot of fun doing that. It was a sextet. We went down to Columbia to record it, and that was quite an experience being down there, in a legendary room with really great string players. – I remember Seymour Barab was on cello. I had not experienced that before; that was the first time I’d actually written strings and put them on a record.

– But after that, it was back to FOGHAT for the “Girls To Chat” and “Zig-Zag Walk”?

Right, and for “In The Mood For Something Rude” as well. I didn’t play bass on “Girls To Chat” – Craig [MacGregor] did it – but I played percussion a lot: I had a whole percussion setup next to Roger, and we’d do that live on a lot of those songs. And I played bass on “In The Mood For Something Rude” – I honestly don’t know why I ended up doing it on that record, but I did. I used a Gibson Thunderbird – I don’t remember where the hell I got – and I used it just for the fun of it, rather than my Fender Jazz, which I’d used on everything else. And I played bass on “Zig-Zag Walk” again: we recorded that album in my house in Atlanta – very quickly, in about three weeks. We had Eric Cartwright on guitar on all three of those records, because Rod had left the band.

Rod was a great slide player, a really good, really original musician influenced by Duane Allman and Elmore James, and he had a great tone to his non-slide playing. Eric brought a whole different flavor to the band, because Rod was a Gibson guy, and Eric was big into Fenders – Stratocasters and Telecasters – so he had a completely different sound and completely different approach; he was very influenced by country pickers like [link id=’19947′ text=’Albert Lee’]. And he got me into Fenders too, even though I’d always been a Gibson guy. We went down to Manhattan, 47th Street, one time, and there was a used guitar store right next to the legendary “Manny’s Music” where I bought a Strat and a Tele, with him telling me, “You want this because of this!” and “You want that because of that!” I still have, in fact, my Telecaster right here (raises up the instrument he had in his lap all the time) – same one, 63 Tele, with the original bridge pickup in it. It’s my baby, it’s what I play when I go out and play live, this is all I use.

– May I ask why are you holding the guitar at the moment?

Oh, you know, when I have my lunch, I sit in front of the computer and watch videos, and then I’ll pick up my guitar and pick along while I’m watching. It’s just when I’m home, I’ve usually got an instrument with me.

– You wrote two songs for “Girls To Chat”: “Let Me Get Close To You” and “Sing About Love” which is marked as a live recording. Is there a studio version of that?

It wasn’t really a live recording. We got some people from around the way to come over and act like an audience. We did that on “In The Mood For Something Rude” too: we went down to a bar and got a couple girls to come back with us and make sexy breathing sounds. We were always like, “Okay, we need some people on this to stomp feet or make noise or whatever!”

– You appeared as two different persons on “Zig-Zag Walk”: producer Franz Leipkin and bassist Eli Jenkins. Why?

We called that album our contractual obligation record. The band didn’t want to do it at that time, so we just threw it off really quick. And because it was lighthearted, I decided to use pseudonyms on it – for fun. Bob Ludwig, the mastering engineer, went along with the joke, and was listed as Kurt Wenzler. It was all based on “The Producers”: there was a character named Franz Liebkind, which we misspelled, so we made Bob German, too, just for the hell of it. It was typical FOGHAT silliness.

– But it all became serious when you signed to Motown and released “A Crowd Of One” a few years later. How did that happen?

It was through a guy named Johanan Vigoda, who was Stevie Wonder’s and Richie Havens’ lawyer. I met him a long time ago because he used to work with Tim Moore. He knew people at Motown, and they were trying to branch out after moving to Los Angeles – I think there was one other white artist on the label – so they were interested in what I wanted to do. You’d have to ask them why they signed this kid that’s got nothing to do with the Motown legacy, but they did. I had made most of the record even before I signed with them, and there was no conflict with them as far as my stuff went. There were a few things I’d submitted to possibly be a single, because Motown always want that on the record. I didn’t really think about that when I made my first album, because FM radio was still a big thing then, and you didn’t necessarily need a single, although I did end up having one [“In The Blue”]. Motown didn’t give me specs to follow or anything, but when I would submit them something, they said, “Oh, that’s too mellow!” or “Let’s do this instead!”

– You played most of the instruments on that album too. Didn’t Motown give you budget to re-record with other musicians what you’d done before signing with them?

I guess I could have done it there with the band, but what I was doing was writing and recording at the same time: I’d get an idea, I’d write a song, and then I’d go ahead and put it down with the intention of it being a demo, and a lot of times it would end up being the final version. There were a few other people in there – I had another drummer on one song, I had a sax player on there, and I had some background vocals – but I had my own studio at that point in my house, and it was quite small, so it wasn’t really practical to do much more. We did the FOGHAT thing down there, but it was tight. After I signed with Motown, I did get a budget to buy a bunch of equipment, and that was my first introduction to MIDI recording, which was very exciting because it was so fast, and I had a pretty basic setup before that. I had my little Putney synthesizer, a Prophet-5, an Oberheim Four Voice, a Minimoog and two Chamberlins, the forerunners of the Mellotron that were much better than Mellotrons, but after I signed with Motown, I got a PPG Wave 2.2 synthesizer – I was into Thomas Dalby, so I thought it sounded cool – a [Yamaha] DX7 with a bunch of extension racks, an Emulator II and Linn 9000. So I finished the album off after I’d signed with them and wrote some additional things. The single “Weatherman” was very much a product of my having that Linn sequencer and drum machine, and you hear that: there’s a lot of ostinato, MIDIfied stuff, if that’s not sounding too obscure. I remember how I wrote it. I was out at a jazz club, came back at midnight or so, started messing around with my sequencer and came up with that groove – and before I knew it, I had a song.

That’s a whole different way of working. If you listen to my first album, it’s a lot more organic, and I do prefer the feel of that album more, but on the second one, I used a lot of drum machines and things like that – although not on everything. It was also quite influenced by what was going then. I look back and I go, “Ooh, that sounds Eighties!” – I should have been less influenced by bands like MEN WITHOUT HATS – whereas my first album doesn’t stick in any time period, probably because it is more blues-based. But I like some of the songs in the second album. I started doing it because it was fun and it was convenient, but looking back, you do lose something. Listen to modern music: so much is MIDI and quantized! Nowadays, even in Nashville, they will take a live performance and quantize that using Pro Tools; they’ll line everything up on a grid because they want it to be exact. That’s a scourge of the modern age: everything’s got to be perfect, and of course, there are backlashes to that. More indie-type bands don’t do this, so I think we’re going to hopefully see a backlash to artificial intelligence, generative AI in music, which is a terrible thing. I don’t want to keep dumping on Nashville, but it’s very common down there – there are writers there using ChatGPT while they’re working on lyrics. I don’t understand how you could do that! Art is supposed to be one soul touching another soul, not an algorithm touching another soul! Generative AI is basically plagiarism, and to use it making music for anything other than just machine-type stuff is a shame! That’s my rant on technology. (Laughs.)

– “Weatherman” sounds very Eighties to me, but it still has this bass intro: did you try to remind people that you were a bass player with FOGHAT?

No, I don’t consider myself a bass player, although I made “Slow Ride” and all that stuff. I don’t think I’ve ever thought that I have to show my bass playing or my guitar playing. I did “Already Free” shortly after I’d left FOGHAT, and I’d been practicing bass a lot, so that translated to the album. I also did use real bass on some songs on “A Crowd Of One” as opposed to electronic bass, but I wasn’t really thinking that way. And it’s actually a DX7 on “Weatherman” – a sound called Super Bass that the DX7 used to have. It’s Clavinet-ish and bassy, and it was a cool sound that you could use in a lot of ways, and I used it way too much. I’d have to listen to it again, but I imagine there’s something like a Minimoog bass line under that too.

– Were you surprised with the success of “Weatherman”? I would expect “Bring Your Love To Me” or “Last Act Of A Desperate Man” to be hits…

Yeah, I guess so. I don’t know if I was surprised. Again, that was a Motown pick. They’d originally wanted another one, and then they went back to “Weatherman.” But I like “Last Act Of A Desperate Man” and I like the production on it: it’s a really good song, one of my favorite things on that record. An interesting story: [writers] Richard and Leslie Bach liked that record, and the title “Last Act Of A Desperate Man” Richard purposely worked into one of the chapters of his book “One.” The character asks, “What’s the last act of a desperate man?” And the answer was: to change. He got that from me. They also mention one of my albums, I think that one, when they’re describing somebody’s record collection. I’m in a book, and It’s kind of cool! Thank you very much for using that, Richard! (Laughs.)

– You and Richard were also supposed to release a joint album, weren’t you?

I was in my thirties, living in Atlanta at the time when I recorded that album for Motown. Richard and Leslie had a friend who worked at the label and, as somebody at Motown told me, they fell in love with it. So I wrote them a letter: “I’m glad you like my album, thanks very much. I’m in the middle of reading ‘The Bridge Across Forever’ and I really love it!” They got back to me, we started talking by phone and exchanging letters, and then they asked me if I would help them edit “One”: for some reason, they trusted me with that. They sent it to me, I went through it and made some notes on it, but they also had the idea of recording an album to go with it. I recorded demos for a double album, some of them pretty much finished records. Every choice you make can lead you into a different direction, but a parallel universe exists where you could have made another choice: that’s what the book is about. So I took each chapter in my own direction to create a song; I would do something parallel to the idea of the chapter rather than describing what’s in the chapter or writing a song about the main person in the chapter.

For instance, there was one chapter about a spiritual master that they met on their travels and what he had done, so I wrote a song about the Buddha, about the life of young Gautama Siddhartha and how he got enlightened. I didn’t come right out and say that’s what it was, but I wrote it from the first person. Unfortunately, we could not find a record company that understood the concept at all. At the time, that was pretty radical – the idea of releasing a record with a book was not something anybody had done, and labels didn’t know how to do it. Nowadays, it would be a no-brainer: you get a bestselling author like Richard Bach, he wants to put out some music with the thing – sure, you can package it in any kind of way. But back then, we couldn’t make it fly. I’m still very fond of that music and that time we had together, though. Richard and Leslie were dear friends. – I’m saying that in the past tense, because we fell out of touch about twenty years ago.

– So there’s no chance to hear that album?

I’d always gotten along well with Motown’s publishing company, Joe Bett, but Richard and Leslie Bach didn’t want to give them the rights to the album. But those recordings were intended to be demos anyway, and we were going to do it all again, although some of them I probably would have just left the way they were. The tapes are very old now, and the multitracks are long gone, but I made transfers of some of the mixes fifteen years ago. One day, if I’m a famous recording artist, maybe it’ll get some traction, but I would, of course, need to reconnect with Richard and Leslie in order to release anything.

– Was your contract with Motown a one-album deal?

No, there were supposed to be multiple albums, but I got into a very bad accident after that one – I was in Pennsylvania rock climbing, and I soloed something I shouldn’t have and smashed up my ankle. I was in and out of the hospital for a year, so I just wasn’t able to deliver a record, and I lost my contract. That’s probably why I got into acting: because I needed a way to make money.

– Didn’t Motown want you to produce somebody? Smokey Robinson, say?

That would have been something I feel I would not be worthy of, but I don’t think we ever talked about producing anyone else, though. I did produce one other record on Motown, which, unfortunately, was never released – the single was – and on that record, I did have run-ins with the label. It was Kim O’Leary, wonderful singer-songwriter from Australia. She writes beautiful ballads and got a great sound, but they kept pushing us to do more uptempo, dance-oriented stuff. It wasn’t like they were trying to get us to be legacy Motown or anything, or sound less white, however. Their A&R guy Steve Buckley, a real nice person, had been involved in a lot of hits and would always ask us to do something in this or that groove, but it had nothing to do with who Kim was. We got bent a little bit with our choice of material. She and I wrote together – we wrote and recorded it at the same time.

– So you went to work with Glenn Medeiros?

I didn’t work with him. He just did a song from my Kim’s album, “I Don’t Want To Lose Your Love.”

– And you wrote “Message From The Doctor” for Richie Havens.

I wrote that really quickly. I’d been trying to write a song for a long time about Papa Doc Duvalier who ruled Haiti with fear, because I found it fascinating how one of the fears people had was that he was a reincarnation of Papa Legba, one of the Voudon gods. Then, that song came to me one night, and I cut a very fast demo – I think I cut it in about an hour and a half – and that’s the track that ended up on Richie’s album. I met Richie through Johanan Vigoda. Johanan played this song for Richie, and Richie liked it, so he put some congas and his guitar on it, but the backing track is the demo that I’d originally written for myself. I came into the studio with Vigoda when Richie did his vocal, because Vigoda was producing that record [“Now”].

And Vigoda was a character, he had a very interesting way of talking; in fact, I’ve used his voice on cartoons. He’d say things like (imitates Vigoda’s high-pitched croak), “You know what, Nick, forget it, this is ridiculous! There’s no money up front. These people are quite crazy. Listen to me!” And he’d be in the studio with Richie talking like that: “Richie, do it again! A little more energy!” I did a show one time called “Mission Hill” where one of my characters was a guy named Weirdo Beardo who ran an obscure video store, selling old out-of-print movies and stuff that you won’t find anywhere else; and the first thing you hear in the show is him speaking from another room: “Oh, please, June Lockhart did not play the mother in that!” – I’m glad I got to use Vigoda’s voice on that. But getting back to Richie Havens,I ran into him again in Philadelphia later, when we were on the same bill at a big concert at “The Electric Factory”; it was nice to see him – he was a very sweet guy, his whole vibe was very warm and giving.

– A little later, FOGHAT reformed and you went to produce “Return Of The Boogie Men” and co-wrote “Motel Shaker” for that album.

Rick Rubin had wanted them to do a record and was talking to the band, but it eventually didn’t work out, so they asked me if I wanted to do it. I hadn’t done anything like that for a while – I was acting – but it seemed like a fun thing, and we had fun recording it. There was some great stuff on there. We did it in LA, at the “Stagg Street” studio, and I mixed it in Glendale. And we did it quite quickly, as I was pushing the guys to really rock out, because Dave had started to stretch out and do different stuff on the records that hadn’t done that well. People wanted FOGHAT to be FOGHAT, you know, to do that classic rock thing, so we went back to more of that.

– You also played on their “Under The Influence” album and, among other things, re-recorded your “Slow Ride” solo.

Yeah, they wanted people who were involved with FOGHAT in the past to come in, so they brought in Kim Simmons from SAVOY BROWN, a monster guitar player who blew me away. Craig, who would, unfortunately, pass away from cancer, was quite sick at that time, and he didn’t make it to the sessions, but they were able to overdub him on some stuff later. But I did not want to repeat my funky solo on “Slow Ride” – I’d already done that – so I did a solo in a more guitaristic way, bending notes and so on. I thought it was really cool, but they had Craig reproduce my solo – I played the rest of the song, but they punched Craig in to do the solo; I disagree with that choice, but it wasn’t my call.

– How does it feel to be part of that legacy now?

We have a double album coming out, a re-release of “Fool For The City” for its fifty-year anniversary. I remastered it based on what Bob Ludwig and I had done back in the day. I was able to use a couple of tracks that Bob had done, but the rest of the tape was too damaged, so I had to reproduce it myself. It finally sounds the way it sounded when it was recorded. Remastering to me is a disease, especially for classic albums like “Fool For The City” that were done some time ago, because back then when I would mix a record – I’ll speak just for myself, but I think this was common for everybody I knew – I didn’t have automation and stuff, I didn’t have all the equipment, I certainly didn’t have plugins because there was nothing to plug into because we didn’t have computers. So when you’d mix a song, you might have the assistant engineer and the bass player moving faders because you needed a lot of hands on the console because everything was done in real time. We would just try to get the best mix possible, knowing that I would go into my favorite mastering lab, which happened to be always with Bob Ludwig at that time, to finish it, EQ it, compress it, limit it, balance the levels out and make sure everything worked together.

Nowadays, when people mix, and this includes myself, a lot of time after the mix is done, it’s done. We’ll do what used to be done in mastering during the mix, we’ll compress the stereo bus, we’ll maybe add some EQ because we can, and if there’s mastering at all, it’s usually pretty subtle. But in those days, in the analog days and the pre-automation days, mixing and mastering were two very different things. You knew when you mixed a record that you were going to go in and master it and polish it up, and make it really pop and really punch. Today, when record companies remaster these things, it’s basically a way to sell more records: if we put out a remaster, they think, people think it’s better, only it’s not! I have not seen an instance where a record was remastered better, and a lot of times they’ll just say “From the original mixtape”… In fact, that’s what they were going to do with this record until I talked them out of it. When you take an album like that and cut it from the original mixtape and tell everybody that’s better, that’s wrong. That’s incorrect, because I never meant that original mixtape to be heard, it’s an unfinished product at that point. It’s like going into Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant and saying, “I want the food, but I want it in its original form, without any seasoning!” or “Don’t cook it. I want the pure original food!” It’s just hype. It’s nonsense. So when you see a record that says “Remastered,” it’s usually not been helped.

It often happens when a record is being put out on CD. They say, “Well, the mastering was done for vinyl, so we’ll remaster it!” and they use the original tape and make that a big deal. What’s been out there on “Fool For The City” on previous reissues sounds to me like it’s pretty much the original tape with a little bit of widening done on it, which it didn’t need and which I wouldn’t have wanted. It sounds dull and lifeless compared to the way it originally sounded, so I’m glad I got it back to where it’s supposed to be. And everybody’s very happy with it. I have to say that “Foghat Live” suffered more from being remastered than this because I had to mix it a lot quicker, and at the time it came out it was brighter than most records – it really jumped out of the speakers – but now that’s all gone: there’s no compression, there’s no EQ, it’s just the raw tapes. I don’t even like the way it sounds. Honestly, I really don’t! I told Roger and Linda [Earl, FOGHAT manager] if they do a reissue on their own label, it needs to be remastered and I’ll do it. Or maybe there’s a tape of Bob Ludwig’s mastering that is actually playable, and I would use it because all I did in remastering “Fool For The City” was try to make it sound the way Bob did it, because he and I worked for quite some time to get that, and I’m familiar with his methods and the kind of equipment he was using. I remember some of the stuff we did, and I cloned it by ear and by memory, listening to his mastering; even the songs that weren’t usable because of tape dropouts or whatever, I could still hear what they sounded like.

Some of the confusion about this is because mastering has two meanings. Originally, it meant cutting it to disc, making a master disc, and it was all about the guy who could run the lathe best and the kind of quality materials he used. Then, as time went on and more equipment and techniques became available, mastering engineers became known for the kind of sweetening and enhancement that they would do before pressing it. The legendary mastering engineers, guys like Bernie Grundman and Bob Ludwig, aren’t known for their ability to work a lathe – that stuff’s all automated, that’s a done deal; what they’re known for is what they do to the to the sound before it’s cut – the EQ, compression, limiting and sometimes, nowadays, widening. Sometimes they’ll mono out the bass for vinyl back in the day or even now, because it avoids certain problems. When producers talk about mastering, that’s what we’re talking about. Record companies will say, “Remastered onto turquoise vinyl at half-speed!” – as if that’s what makes a difference. It might make a better vinyl, but it’s not going to change the sound of the record. In my case, I’m not remastering – I’m going back and doing the original mastering. It’s wrong to take an artist and producer’s work and throw away the seasoning, and say, “Oh, it’s better without that because it’s original!” So that’s my spiel on remastering. (Laughs.)

What I also did for this newly mastered reissue was working on live tapes from 1975. Shortly after we had recorded “Fool For The City” and “Slow Ride” was released, we wanted to make a live album, so we recorded two shows at The Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, which turned out to be a horrible room to record in for a lot of reasons. We also had many technical problems with the recordings, and I had decided not to use them, which was a shame because they were good performances. We didn’t have the means to fix things like that back then, but I was able to now. It was a lot of work: I must have spent a week on each song just resuscitating it and getting rid of all the problems, but the energy is great. I like it better than “Foghat Live”! And I’m very glad that we’ve got a live album out with me and the band, because we had a certain thing coming right off of that record. We were on a good roll, and I have to say I’m playing bass on there that I could not play today – there’s a bass solo, a back-and-forth between Rod Price and I, that I don’t have the chops tp play that way anymore. I didn’t know I had them then! Man, I sound like Stanley Clark! That’s ridiculous! (Laughs.) That’s me playing and singing live with the old ‘HAT.

– What about your work on “1984” by NEON CHRIST? You like hardcore punk?

I didn’t really get in the hardcore punk scene. They asked me if I would do it, and yeah, I did. They were from Atlanta, where I was living, and I recorded them in my house. It was the only album I did that was like that, but I really liked the band. I thought they were very creative, a lot of energy, and that was fun.

– People know you now as an actor, not a singer, but you did sing in the “SpongeBob SquarePants Movie” and “The Lorax”?

Yeah, I was occasionally cast to sing character stuff, especially in Disney and DreamWorks projects, I’d been doing that for a while. The great [singer and vocal contractor] Bobbie Page had booked me on a lot of movies, and she wanted me for “SpongeBob”; and [singer and vocal contractor] Edie Lehmann Boddicker – the wife of Michael Boddicker, the famous keyboard player who worked with Michael Jackson and many others – brought me in for the demos of “The Lorax” to sing some character parts. Edie wanted me to be in the choir just to get an extra paycheck, she felt like I’d worked hard so I deserved to be there, but that score was way too advanced for my reading chops – it was very, very challenging, like reading Stravinsky or something! – so I fumbled my way through it, and it was embarrassing. And I probably pissed off the guy off on the mic who was next to me – in fact, I know I did. (Laughs.).

– About ten years ago, you mentioned in an interview that you’d been writing a lot of songs. When can we expect a third solo album from you, then?

Hopefully soon. Linda Earl has just asked me if I would do it on their label. I’ve been doing so many other things and focusing on stand-up comedy and one-man shows, and just playing live music; I haven’t really thought of recording for a while. But I’ve got most of one of the albums I want to do recorded – it’s based on my one-man show “Why Are You So Old?”: I recorded a lot of those songs, and the rest are written, so it wouldn’t be too much work to finish that. This is the first thing I want to do, but there are others. I want to film my own stand-up special, at least one, because I’ve got several different shows worth of material. So I can’t give you a date, but hopefully, it will be this year.